U.S. Embassy in Cuba Reopens After More Than 50 Years
By AZAM AHMEDJULY 20, 2015
Photo
Hundreds of Cubans lined up outside the newly reopened American Embassy in Havana on Monday morning to apply for visas. CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
By AZAM AHMEDJULY 20, 2015
Photo
Hundreds of Cubans lined up outside the newly reopened American Embassy in Havana on Monday morning to apply for visas. CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
- restoring relations between Cubaand the United States, both public and private, yet most observers say they believe it will be many more years before mutual wariness fades.
A litany of questions have yet to be answered, including: Will the American trade embargo that has crippled Cuba’s economy be lifted, and if so, when? Will the Cuban government improve its human rights record and incorporate outsiders into the political spectrum? How much, and how fast, will the lives of ordinary Cubans, who earn $20 a month on average, improve?
Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE-
As U.S. and Cuba Relations Warm, Property Claims Issue Is RevivedJULY 19, 2015 - Cuba Offers Its Citizens Better Access to InternetJUNE 18, 2015
- U.S. and Cuba Agree to Reopen Embassies, Officials SayJUNE 30, 2015
-
Cuba’s Web Entrepreneurs Search for U.S. Clients, and Reliable Wi-FiJUNE 10, 2015
Photo
Tourists on a bus tour in Havana. More than two years of effort went into restoring relations between the United States and Cuba. CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times
“It is sort of like a wedding,” said James Williams, the president of an advocacy group, Engage Cuba, which has been lobbying for improved relations. “You’ve spent all this time planning your wedding day, and finally you’re getting to see someone walk down the aisle.”
“Now,” he added, “you have the rest of your life together.”
If Cubans are expecting bells and canapés to celebrate the nuptials, they will be sorely disappointed. The official celebration to inaugurate the American Embassy will not take place until later in the summer, when Secretary of State John Kerry plans to visit, to formally raise the flag and install the new signage.
In Washington, however, shouts of “Viva Cuba” rang out on Monday as Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, raised his country’s flag outside the newly reopened Cuban embassy.
In Havana, a line had already formed at 6 a.m. along the side of the American Embassy, a large building. Families clutched sheaths of paper as they awaited interviews and appointments with officials now operating under the auspices of an embassy.
Beyond the edge of the tidy line, hundreds more gathered in a small park awaiting their turn, and dozens more formed a separate line beyond that. For the first time in decades, American Embassy personnel were managing the order of entrants, taking names, calling names, answering questions.
Continue reading the main story
RELATED IN OPINIONThose waiting were a medley of people. Many had relatives in America they planned to visit or live with. Almost all had made appointments months — some said years — earlier to facilitate their visas, and, they said, just happened to arrive on the building’s first day as an official embassy.
U.S. & POLITICS By Erica Berenstein 2:28
Returning Stars and Stripes to Havana
Continue reading the main storyVideo
Returning Stars and Stripes to Havana
Wayne S. Smith honeymooned in Cuba before taking a post at the United States Embassy in Havana. He is one of the last living American diplomats who witnessed the day the embassy closed in 1961.
By Erica Berenstein on Publish Date June 30, 2015. Watch in Times Video »
“To be honest I’m a little a nervous,” said Ramon Castillo Perez, 59, who was waiting to visit America for the first time, a trip that would reunite him with his wife. The trip would be a permanent one if all went well — his wife was sponsoring his arrival in the United States.
For now, though, the change, was barely perceptible from the outside, arguably a metaphor for the state of Cuba itself.
Technically, there will be differences. Diplomats will be formally registered, and, for the first time since the embassy was closed, they will be allowed to travel freely in Cuba. They will be invited to functions, too, like members of other diplomatic corps.
The American government is supposed to ease access for Cubans entering the embassy and for the American Foreign Service officers inside, a State Department official said.
Mr. Obama, when announcing an end to the diplomatic freeze, eased travel restrictions, opened the door for more remittances to Cuba, and expanded the amount of goods that visiting Americans could take home, like Cuban cigars and rum. In May, he removed the country from the list of nations that sponsor terrorism.
President Raúl Castro has spent the past five years, before the thaw began with the Obama administration, trying to jump-start the nation’s economy, ordering that hundreds of thousands of government employees be laid off, encouraging Cubans into self-employment and entrepreneurship, and creating a special economic zone in the coastal city of Mariel to attract foreign investment.
But many of these changes have been confronted with bracing realities. A farm program to encourage crop cultivation struggled because of regulations and a lack of reliable transportation, and the mass public-sector layoffs Mr. Castro promised never really materialized. Real estate overhauls that now allow Cubans to sell their homes have run into a problem that vexes just about every segment of Cuban life: a lack of supplies.
Photo
A barber shop in central Havana. Some fear that Cuban culture will be lost with the opening of the island, but others think they will be able at last to earn more money.CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times
Often, these initiatives have been ensnared by the mentality that has both preserved and ossified Cuban life, one forged through years of anti-American sentiment that has defined the social, political and economic lives of Cubans. Letting go of that is not easy.
Mr. Castro has said that change will be slow, and that it will not come at the cost of stability or values. Again and again, what emerges is this: Cuba will change, yes, but at its own pace and with no apologies.
For many Cubans, that is reason enough for hope.
“The genie is out of the bottle,” said Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a former Cuban diplomat who is close to Mr. Castro and his brother Fidel, the country’s longtime president. “And once it’s out, you’re not going to be able to put it back in.”
Out of the bottle or not, life continues as usual in Havana. A number of Cubans know about the opening of the American Embassy and have formulated opinions about what it will mean for them.
Continue reading the main story
RECENT COMMENTS
NM
12 minutes ago
Now is the time to end the automatic asylum status of every Cuban who arrives on US land, as refugee status entitles them to free social...
Walter Rhett
12 minutes ago
Long live the new era in US - Cuba relations! Even countries with historic differences can find common ground and paths to mutual progress...
Jack
18 minutes ago
It is time for the US to finally clean up their act with Cuba and give back to the Cuban people the base and property at Guantanamo. There...
- SEE ALL COMMENTS
- WRITE A COMMENT
“For me, inequality is not a problem,” said Lázaro Borrero, 39, a journeyman worker who does a bit of construction, cooking and tobacco rolling to make ends meet. “If you earn $1 million a year, and I earn $1 a year, good for you.”
Photo
Oswaldo Alamo, 66, in the government-owned shop in Havana where he sells rationed food items. Mr. Alamo said he supported the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States. CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times
Change that will have an effect on the wallets of normal Cubans is, by some estimates, many years away. It will require the lifting of the American embargo as well as what many Cubans refer to as the “internal embargo,” or the state impediments that exist in everyday life, from communications to buying groceries.
It will require change from within the Cuban system and adapting to economic norms that might require letting go of some of their control, experts say.
“Cuba has more of a challenge to change than does the United States,” said Ricardo Pascoe, a former Mexican ambassador to Cuba. “They’re going to have to open up one way or another.”
But it will not be only the Cubans who change. American tourists are expected to come in waves to discover a nation so long forbidden, and there will also be families who can reunite without having to cross political minefields.
Consider Lucía Nuñez, the director of the Civil Rights Department for the government of Madison, Wis. Her parents, born in Cuba, left the country a year before America severed diplomatic ties with it under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1961.
Ms. Nuñez drifted emotionally from Cuba over the years, growing up in the Virgin Islands and eventually moving to New England for high school and college. She was ashamed, she said, of having parents with accents and a cuisine that differed from her friends’.
She raised her children in the United States and has lived in Wisconsin for the past 17 years. Her mother, who has been back to Cuba only once since leaving, missed the deaths of her brothers on the island.
“I spent a lot of years denying I was Cuban,” Ms. Nuñez said from the home of a Cuban entrepreneur who has been licensed to rent to foreign visitors. “But there’s no denying it: I am Cuban. I am as much frijoles negros as I am Bruce Springsteen.”
So this summer, she, her 81-year-old mother and her 19-year-old daughter decided to take a trip to Havana and to the small town near Guantánamo where the family is from. They recently arrived in Cuba and plan to stay for about a month, and Ms. Nuñez’s mother will see her sister for the first time in years.
“I hope the normalcy of the relations — or whatever it is they are calling them — I hope it brings us closer to the family I used to have,” she said.
-
